Paul Robeson Dead at 77; Singer, Actor and Activist

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996.
To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems.
Please send reports of such problems to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

Paul Robeson, the singer, actor and black activist, died yesterday at the age of 77 in Philadelphia.

He had suffered a stroke on Dec. 28 and had been taken to Presbyterian Medical Center. Doctors said he was suffering from a severe cerebral vascular disorder.

Mr. Robeson, who had been an all‐America football star at Rutgers, where he also won letters in baseball, basketball and track and a Phi Beta Kappa key, had refused interviews and had seen only members of his family and close friends in recent years.

For decades, he was known internationally as a concert artist, singing such songs as “Ol’ Man River,” and as a stage actor, perhaps best remembered in the role of Othello.

One of the most influential performers and political figures to emerge from black America, Mr. Robeson was under a cloud in his native land during the cold war as a political dissenter and an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union.

However, in his 75th year, Mr. Robeson was the subject of high praise by Clayton Riley, the American cultural historian:

“One of the nation's greatest men, an individual whose time on earth has been spent in the pursuit of justice for all human beings and toward the enlightenment of men and women the world over.”

This encomium could be printed in a national newspaper in 1972 without raising a perceptible furor, but unstinting praise of Mr. Robeson as a man and as an interpretive artist would have been unusual in the United tSates between 1945 and 1963, the year his arteriosclerosis, and moodiness, forced him into retirement.

Although Mr. Robeson denied under oath that he was a Communist Party member, affilia tion with it was generally imputed to him because he proudly performed for so many trade unions and organizations deemed “subversive” and for so many causes promoted in leftwing periodicals. This activity caused such agitation that one of his concerts in Peekskill, N. Y., was disrupted by vigilantes; professional concert halls were refused him and commercial bookings grew scarce. His income dropped from $100,000 in 1947 to $6,000 in 1952.

Passport Dispute

Another result of Mr. Robeson's overt alliance between his art and his politics was the State Department's cancellation; in 1950, of his passport on the ground that he had refused to sign the then‐required non‐Communist oath. He declined, he explained, because he believed that the Government had no right to base his freedom to travel on his political beliefs, or a lack of them. He took the department to court, and in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled, 5 to 4, in a related case, that Congress had not authorized the department to withhold passports because of applicants’ “beliefs and association”

Although Mr. Robeson's suit had not yet reached the Court, be benefited from its decision and was given a passport. He departed immediately for Britain, asserting, “I don't want any overtones of suggestion that I am deserting the country of my birth. If I have a concert in New York, I will go there and return to London.”

He toured Europe and Australia as a singer; and in 1959 he .appeared as the Moor, one of his most celebrated stage roles, in “Othello” at Stratfordon‐Avon.

Although Mr. Robeson was unwelcome in many quarters, except in the black community, during the cold war, he was widely recognized abroad. On his 60th birthday, in 1958, celebrations were held in a number of countries, including India. There Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru described the singeractor as “one of the greatest artists of our generation [who] reminds us that art and human dignity are above differences of race, nationality and color.”

The same birthday was also an occasion for his first New York recital in 11 years, a soldout house at Carnegie Hall. “When Mr. Robeson made his appearance,” Harold C. Schonberg wrote in The Times, “he was greeted with a long standing ovation.” The critic noted that the performer was “a burly, imposing figure with tremendous dignity” whose bassbaritone was not “the voice of the artist in his prime.” In a concert in London later that year, he sang in a limited tone range, according to one critic, but brought the house down with “Ol’ Man River.” the Oscar Hammerstein 2d‐Jerome Kern song with which Mr. Robeson had been identified the late 1920's.

Two of the song's lines —“Let me go ’way from de Mississippi/Let me go ’way from de white men boss” — were Mr. Robeson's call for black identity, and the passion with whiCh he sang them almost always roused an audience.

Two other songs closely identified with Mr. Robeson were ‘“Ballad for Americans” (lyrics by John Latouche, score by Earl Robinson) and “Joe Hill” (lyrics by Alfred Hayes, score by Mr. Robinson). He sang “Ballad” on a national radio show in 1939, and it was an enormous success, leading to a repeat broadcast and a recording. “Joe Hill,” a song about a union organizer executed for an alleged murder, was especially popular at labor gatherings. Its final line, “Don't mourn for me — organize,” usually brought an audience to its feet.

Mr. Robeson befitted physically the stature his friends accorded him. Standing 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 240 pounds in his prime, he was a man of commanding presence. He spoke slowly and deliberately and with force. His bassbaritone, in his best years, was vibrant and evocative, and his control over it was considered admirable.

Whether Mr. Robeson was the black leader that his friends supposed was a matter of conjecture. It was often pointed out that, spending so much of his life abroad, he had relatively few profound associations with the black community in this country. He stood more as a symbol of black attainment, it was said, and of black consciousness and of pride. Once asked why he did not live in the Soviet Union, which he visited frequently, he retorted:

“Because my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you And no Fascist‐minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

Born in Princeton, N. J., on April 9, 1898, Paul Robeson was the youngest child of the Rev. W. D. Robeson, a North Carolina plantation slave until he ran away in 1860. His mother, who died when Paul was 9, was a Philadelphia teacher.

A bright student, he won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1915, where he was the third black to attend the then‐private college. At the New Brunswick school he starred in football, baseball, basketball and track, winning a dozen varsity letters. Walter Camp, the college football arbiter who twice selected Mr. Robeson as an allAmerica, called him “the greatest defensive end that ever trod the gridiron.”

Robeson of Rutgers, as the sports writers dubbed him, also won a Phi Beta Kappa key in his junior year and was elected to Cap and Skull, the honor society, as a senior. After graduation in 1919 he moved to Harlem, then an emerging black community, and enrolled at the Columbia Law School, where he received his degree. He never practiced, however, because in 1921 he married Eslanda Cardozo Goode, a brilliant Columbia chemistry student, who directed his career toward the theater and who was his stalwart manager until her death in 1965.

She helped to persuade him to take a role in “Simon the Cyrenian” at the Young Men's Christian Association in 1920. “Even then,” he recalled, “I never meant to [become an actor]. I just said yes to get her to quit pestering me.”

New Portals Opened

The appearance opened new portals for Mr. Robeson, who perceived that the stage could be his means of fulfillment. He repeated his Harlem performance at the Lafayette Theater in 1921, and the following year he appeared as Jim in “Taboo” at the Sam H. Harris Theater on Broadway. Although his acting still had its rough edges, he was invited to Britain in mid‐1922 to play opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell in “Taboo,” which had been renamed “The Voodoo.”

Back in New York, he joined the Provincetown Players, a Greenwich Village group that included Eugene O'Neill, in whose “All God's Chillun Got Wings” he starred as Jim Harris.

This led to his appearance as Brutus Jones in “The Emperor Jones,” which was specially revived for him. One of the respected critics to laud Mr. Robeson's acting then was George Jean Nathan, who described him as “one of the most thoroughly eloquent, impressive and convincing actors” he had ever come upon.

The unforced beauty of Mr. Robeson's rich baritone prompted his Provincetown Players associates to sponsor his first concert in 1925, a collection of spirituals, in which he was accompanied by Lawrence Brown, who remained his pianist for 35 years.

Mr. Robeson repeated his triumph in “The Emperor Jones” in London, returned to New York to play Crown in “Porgy” and went back to London in 1928 to play Joe in “Show Boat,” in which his singing of “Ol’ Man River” was one of its most important characteristics.

He lived mostly abroad until 1939, much of the time in London. Although the stage and the concert ball in the United States were then one of the few areas where a black could rise to eminence, the white climate was such that Mr. Robeson was often referred to as “a credit to his race,” an epithet he found offensive. Moreover, black performers in those, days were not accepted as social equals in the white community, whereas there were fewer color barriers in Britain.

A London Success

One of his spectacular successes in London came in 1930, when he played the lead in “Othello,” appearing with Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike and Maurice Brown. His performance was to many an unforgettable experience.

Afterward he toured the chief European cities as a recitalist, and played in “Plant in the Sun,” “The Hairy Ape,” “Toussaint L'Ouverture,” “Stevedore,” “Black Boy” and “John Henry.” Meantime, he also ventured seriously into the movies. His first film, “Body and Soul,” had been made in 1924, but it had circulated only in the American black ghettos. Now he starred in “Sanders of the River,” “King Solomon's Mines,” “Big Fella,’ “Proud Valley,” “The Emperor Jones” and “Show Boat.” In all, there were 11 of his pictures.

Mr. Robeson's political ideas took shape slowly, after a jolt from George Bernard Shaw in 11928. Shaw asked him over a luncheon what he thought of Socialism, “I hadn't anything to say,” the actor‐singer re‘called. “I'd never really thought about Socialism.”

In 1934, passing through Germany on his first of many visits to the Soviet Union, he was the object of racial epithets from Hitler's storm troopers, and he was angered. Arriving in Moscow, where he was feted, he was impressed, he said, by the absence of racial prejudice among Soviet citizens.

Later, he often publicly expressed “my belief in the principles of scientific Socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a Socialist society represents an advance to a higher stage of life.”

In the late 1930's Mr. Robeson went to Spain to sing for the Republican troops and for members of the International Brigades who were battling the Franco revolt, which was backed by Hitler and Mussolini. He said he had been moved to return to the United States by what he experienced in Spain.

“I saw the connection between the problems of all oppressed people and the necessity of the artist to participate fully,” he said.

Part of this was evoked in his vigorous rendition of “Ballad for Americans,” which voices a certainty that “our marching song” to a land of freedom and equality “will come again.” “For I have always believed it!” Mr. Robeson sang, “And I believe it now.”

The climate of opinion here was fairly congenial to Mr. Robeson in those years, owing in part to the American‐Soviet war alliance of 1941. His concerts were well attended and his pres's notices were good.

These became ecstatic when, on Oct. 19, 1943, he became the first black to play the role of Othello with a white supporting cast (Jose Ferrer and Uta Hagen) on Broadway in the Theater Guild production.

A number of awards and honorary degrees were bestowed upon him, including in 1944 the Spingarn Medal, generally considered the top award in black life. Its donor was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Meanwhile, Mr. Robeson stepped up his political activity by leading a delegation that urged Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to drop the racial bars in baseball; and by calling on President Harry S. Truman to widen blacks’ civil rights in the South. He became a founder and chairman of the Progressive Party, which nominated former Vice President Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 Presidential race.

Some of Mr. Robeson's troubles during the cold war were traceable to a remark he made at a World Peace Congress in Paris in 1949. “It is unthinkable,” he declared, “that American Negroes will go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against a country [the Soviet Union] which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.”

Concert Canceled

He asserted later that his statement had been taken “slightly out of context,” noting that he had spoken for 2,000 students from the colonial world who had requested him to express their desire for peace. Nonetheless, his words were widely turned against him in the United States, and one consequence was an attack by veterans’ groups and rightwing extremists on crowds arriving for an outdoor concert near Peekskill, N. Y., in August, 1949. The concert was canceled, and Mr. Robeson was irate.

Starting in 1948, Mr. Robeson was questioned several times by Congressional committees. He was usually asked if he were a member of the Communist Party, a query he uniformly declined to answer under his Fifth Amendment rights. He maintained privately, however, that he was not a member.

After falling ill In Europe in 1961, he spent some time in an East German hospital, returning to New York in 1963. He lived quietly in a Harlem apartment until a few years ago, when he moved to the home of his sister, Marian Forsythe, in Philadelphia, where he lived as a virtual recluse. He did not attend a Carnegie Hall program of tribute in 1973 in honor of his 75th birthday, although he sent a recorded message to the gathering, which included many theatrical figures.

Besides his sister, Mr. Robeson is survived by a son, Paul Jr.

A version of this archives appears in print on January 24, 1976, on Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Paul Robeson Dead at 77; Singer, Actor and Activist. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe